Bonus coverage: Tuesdays with Foremski

Silicon Valley execs are already complaining about the restrictions that British authorities have placed on what you can bring with you into an airline cabin. Planes that leave the UK do not allow passengers to bring on any carry on luggage which means no laptops.

No laptops means no work done on the flight, which can be 12 hours or more from London to California, equivalent to a full working day. Maybe the airlines can rent out laptops to travellers. And if you can get your applications plus data files onto a small USB Flash memory drive–about the size of a key ring, that might be a solution.

But that’s provided you can bring the USB Flash drive onboard. No electronic devices are allowed. However, the USB drive doesn’t become electronic unless it is plugged into the laptop – a distinction that might not be acceptable under current rules.

At least our harried elites can catch up on their sleep…

. . . Microsoft’s iPod killer is an MP3 music player called Zune, and it’s a clever way to rhyme with “tune.” But there are a few people chuckling about the name. A Hebrew speaking friend pointed out that it means “you’re f%@cked.”

Did Microsoft mess up on the naming? Or maybe it doesn’t have any Hebrew-speaking employees up in Redmond? Or maybe it was a deliberate choice, because it is a fitting name for Microsoft’s partners who have supported Microsoft’s standard for playing music in their MP3 players. With Microsoft’s Zune hitting markets, it is they who are “Zune-ed” because iPod owners aren’t going to be changing players anytime soon. For those that don’t use an iPod, the Microsoft player is an extremely competitive product.

. . .Last Wednesday evening at club Mighty in San Francisco was the launch party for Sharpcast, a photo sharing site and GigaOm, a tech news site on run by my good buddy Om Malik. It was a good turnout but Sharpcast’s marketing manager’s band used the party as an opportunity to entertain a captive audience that wasn’t there to see the band but wanted to chat and connect. (Some photos are here.)

Fortunately, there was a fenced off area outside the club, and a mild summer evening that allowed some of us mix and mingle without having to shout at each other.

Sharpcast is a cool application that syncs your photo collections between your desktop, mobile phones and stores them out in the “cloud” on Sharpcast. You might be thinking there are already a thousand similar photo sharing sites.

But the company has more ambitious goals and September should see new products being rolled out that let people share their applications and data and sync them across different computers and devices. Soonr, is another company that gives you access to your applications and data from mobile phones.